Even though there should be enough pictures in Chapter 1 to help you understand where our Earth is in relation to the rest of the Universe, some people have a hard time visualizing the big picture from all the numbers, analogies, and the connection to the pictures. So, I have made a little QuickTime movie for you. You need the program QuickTime. If you are using Netscape as a browser, viewing the movie should be automatic. If you are using Explorer you may have to download a QuickTime viewer first. See below.
The movie is a little over 3 1/2 minutes. Be patient downloading it if you are using dial-up. It may take five minutes or more. Once downloaded though, you can see the movie as many times as necessary, stop the streaming video, and go back to previous scenes by clicking on the various buttons provided by the QuickTime viewer. To speed downloading up, there is no sound or narration. So print this page out and read the description below on what you are seeing first. Stop the video from time to time if you need to, review the text below, and then start it again. E-mail me if you have any questions about what you are seeing.
The movie is at:
If you need the QuickTime viewer go to:
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/
Movie Description:
The movie begins with a picture from Earth. Notice that this is a picture at night in New York with the moon next to the now destroyed World Trade Center towers. Next the camera begins to pan out away from our Earth, showing various shots of locations on the Earth and then the Earth itself getting smaller and smaller, until we see what the Earth looks like from the Moon.
A little over half a minute into the film, you will see an animation of our solar system, reminding us that all the planets revolve around the sun. You will also see a comet passing through our solar system. Then it is back to pictures of the Earth that get smaller and smaller. A little over a minute into the film is the key sequence that I want you to "get." The Earth becomes just a small dot and begins to move off to the lower right part of the screen. Then you see a bright dot emerge in the center of the screen. This is our sun. Then the camera begins to pan away and the sun becomes smaller and smaller. (Remember that a million Earths could fit within the sun.) About a minute and a half into the film, the sun becomes so small it disappears, merging into the maze of millions of stars that make up this location of our galaxy. Then the camera will pull away far enough to reveal the startling perspective that our sun is just a grain of sand in a gigantic galaxy. The camera keeps panning away until there is a quick jump out into deep space and you see a galaxy in the middle of the screen surrounded by many other galaxies.
In the next 30 seconds or so, the video is showing us that our universe consists of many, many galaxies, each beginning to look like a point of light as we move further and further away. Then the camera moves back in abruptly to show individual galaxies. The first is the Andromeda galaxy that remember is 2.2 million light-years from Earth. About two and half minutes into the film, you will see a galaxy with a big red arrow pointing at a location in the galaxy. The intention is to inform us that if this were our galaxy, our sun would be located at the outskirts of the galaxy in the general vicinity indicated by the tip of the arrow.
More pictures of various galaxies are then seen, including the unique Sombrero galaxy (it looks like a Mexican hat). Then we are back to seeing these huge galaxies appear as just points of light at incredible distances. Finally, you see the same computerized map of a million galaxies from Chapter 1. Our huge Milky Way galaxy would simply be a pixel of light on this screen. Remember that we should say this is "only" a million galaxies. Astronomers believe that there are at least 100 billion galaxies within the range of our most powerful telescopes. Our Milky Way galaxy would be like a grain of sand on a beach. Actually there are more galaxies than there are grains of sand in all the beaches of the world.
Also, for a short overview of the entire cosmic perspective, see the video clip from the famous Cosmos series by Carl Sagan. And for Sagan's idealistic (and very optimistic by our post 9/11 standards) philosophical spin-off argument see another famous clip from the series. There is sound with these clips, but be very patient downloading at home if you have dial-up.